By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Lisa Peterson. Until Oct 12 at the Festival Theatre. 1-800-511-SHAW.

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONT.—They need fear no power blackouts at the Shaw Festival this summer.

After the production of The Philanderer that opened on Saturday night, there’s enough electricity — sexual, intellectual and theatrical — still crackling around that stage to keep everyone pumped up for the rest of the season.

It was only a few minutes into this production, directed by Festival first-timer Lisa Peterson, an American with an awesome track record stateside, that I suddenly realized I was seeing and hearing something I hadn’t witnessed there in far too long: a truly exciting production of a play by Bernard Shaw.

I guess it began with Sue LePage’s erotically charged set for the first scene, all crimson and black, lit with libidinous firelight and shadows, courtesy of Kevin Lamotte.

A mostly unclothed couple seemed to be having sex on the floor. My God, they were. In a play by Shaw! But as director Peterson points out in her program notes, the play’s stage directions actually begin, “A lady and gentleman are making love to one another,” and all she did was kick it up a notch.

When the lights get brighter, we realize the attractive couple are charm-filled Shaw stalwart Marla McLean and that edgiest of indie actors, Gord Rand. It’s not that Rand hasn’t been at Shaw many times before, but he’s made his mark in shows like a World Stage Hamlet, in which, naked, he asphyxiated himself with a plastic bag, or Volcano Theatre’s Goodness, in which he radiated such intense moral outrage over genocide that you felt he would incinerate the theatre.

And now, he’s Leonard Charteris, philosopher, philanderer and possessor of such superb gender ambivalence that if he hadn’t been born, the 21st century would have had to invent him.

Best of all, Rand blazes with a mind on fire with thought and possesses that rarest of gifts, a mouth that can function as a flame thrower for the words his mind generates.

Not since Ben Carlson switched to Stratford, leaving memories of his superb John Tanner behind, has there been such a totally amazing Shavian performance at the festival.

I’m not even going to try to detail the plot of The Philanderer, for three reasons: it’s too complex, it’s really only a vehicle for the thoughts of the play to take flight, and — most important — this production uses Shaw’s original third act, which he discarded on the advice of friends (and nearly burned!) and which languished unperformed until the 1990s.

All you really need to know about this production is that it sings, triumphantly, in the key of GBS. All those Shavian speeches and characters that can lie dead on the stage like so much wilting kale here spring to life.

The entire cast is superb, from the maddeningly attractive Rand and the destined-to-be-hugged McLean through the always incandescent Moya O’Connell. What a romantic triangle! What players to probe the Pythagorean theorem or any other three-sided piece of geometric tomfoolery!

One can’t forget Michael Ball as the most gently erudite of drama critics, Ric Reid as a passionate father who gets to give up vegetarianism after a cursed year, Jeff Meadows as a wonderfully conflicted doctor, Harveen Sandhu as a perfect Ibsenite woman and Guy Bannerman as Ibsen himself.

LePage has outdone herself with striking sets and costumes in Acts I and II, only to turn the tables on us with something totally surprising in Act III that fits the untried and very different script (which seems totally modern and 2014, by the way, without a word having been changed).

But the genius behind it all is Peterson, who truly loves Shaw and makes the cast share her passion, which they, in turn, pass on to us. Making full use of the diabolically clever sound design of Mark Bennett, she makes the stage a place of never-ending wonder.

So now that the artistic directorship stakes for the Shaw Festival are wide open, let’s find a place on the list for Peterson as well. She directs the hell out of GBS. Shouldn’t that be the first requirement of the job?

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.